You left Jeffrey lost for words!

Six weeks ago Lord Archer challenged MoS readers to write a spine-tingling story in exactly 100 words. Thousands of you took part. And the results? Mini-masterpieces

IT WAS a challenge from Jeffrey Archer that proved irresistible to Mail on Sunday readers.

More than 2,000 of you put pen to paper after the bestselling author asked you to come up with a 100word short story to rival his own effort, tiled Unique.

Here we publish the 12 that made the shortlist, with Steve Harris’s story The Container judged the winner by Lord Archer – or should that be the first among equals?

Lord Archer said: ‘It’s a wonderful response. It’s amazing. When we issued the challenge, I thought 200 entries would be impressive.’

The author, who recently published a collection of short stories called Tell Tale, said The Container was a worthy winner. He said: ‘The secret to a damned good short story, whatever the length, is that it must have a beginning, middle and the end. Some people can do one or two but they can rarely do all three. The Container does just that. It has a beginning that sets you up, a middle that takes you in and an end that knocks you on the nose.’

Archer said the response to the competition was proof people were still passionate about literature, adding: ‘If 2,000 did it, you can be sure 20,000 thought of it. It shows people care about story telling.’

Mr Harris, 54, a businessman from Broom in Warwickshire, said he was ‘surprised and delighted’ to win the prize of £250 of book tokens. The father-of-three said: ‘I have never written anything before but I thought I would give it a go. The idea for The Container had been at the back of my mind for some time. I spent a couple of days working on the ending and when I went back to read it again it made me chuckle.’